Chances are, if you're a regular reader of this weblog, you are either convinced of the case for war with Iraq or you're just coming here for the baseball stuff. But if you still have questions about whether the US needs to wait on UN approval, you can't miss Charles Krauthammer's Sunday column: "by what logic does the blessing of these countries [the permanent members of the UN Security Council] bestow moral legitimacy on American action? China's leaders are the butchers of Tiananmen Square. France and Russia will decide the Iraq question based on the coldest calculation of their own national interest, meaning money and oil." (emphasis mine) (By the way, I'm dying to hear somebody call Krauthammer a "chicken hawk" for his neat tactic of avoiding military service on account of being a paraplegic) (And I have great respect, by the way, for the fact that I was reading Krauthammer's columns for a decade before he mentioned that he is confined to a wheelchair. Sometimes what matters is the power of a man's analysis, not his willingness to deploy his life experiences as argument-stoppers).

Mark Steyn has a similar point, as part of a broader argument that Europe's behavior is completely inconsistent with the rhetoric about how America is supposedly the most dangerous country on earth: "Englandís clergy have redefined the Christian concept of a just war to mean only one blessed by the Security Council, which is to say the governments of France, Russia and China: it will be left to two atheists and a lapsed Catholic to determine whether this is a war Christians can support."